It Was Always You: A Gripping Psychological Suspense Novel

By Sarah K. Stephens

A woman struggles to navigate a new relationship until a sudden tragedy dredges up her troubled past in “this gripping psychological suspense” novel (Dea Poirier, bestselling author of Next Girl to Die).

Morgan isn’t sure about her new boyfriend, Justin. He seems great most of the time, but a recent argument left her feeling shaken. Morgan’s neurologist—who she’s been seeing ever since the hit and run accident she survived as a child—reminds her that she has a bad history of sabotaging relationships. It would be disastrous if she fell back into that pattern.

Now Justin and Morgan are taking a romantic weekend getaway. But Justin’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic—and runs the car into a tree. When Morgan wakes up in the hospital to find that Justin is dead, she has little time to grapple with the news before detectives arrive to question her about the crash. The detectives think Morgan is responsible for Justin’s death, and to in order to prove her innocence, she’ll have to unlock the dark secrets of her past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781504071901

Book preview

1

It’s early afternoon and exactly two days too late when Justin and I set off for our romantic weekend.

When he recommends we take the scenic route, I nod in agreement.

The snow-sleet default of northeastern Ohio winters stops as we’re ready to pull out of my apartment’s parking lot and onto I-680, heading north. Wilting December sun cuts across the sky at a low angle, casting the library tower of the university and the dilapidated buildings surrounding it in a fraudulent glow.

Justin asks to drive, and even though I’d prefer to be behind the wheel—self-confessed nervous driver that he is—I let him. After our fight, I’m the most agreeable girlfriend in the world.

Annie would hate me right about now.

I move to pull out my phone from my purse to use for directions, but Justin tips his head towards the middle console of the car. He’s tucked his phone in one of the cup holders and the screen shines back at the two of us. I already have the address entered in, he says, and the kindness in his voice multiplies my doubts like a cancer.

Sure enough, the map shows a red flag labeled Wolf Mountain Lodge next to a lake and a winding road. I put his phone into the hands-free holder next to the steering wheel, so we can both see it during our drive. Justin’s phone case is bright red, with a sticker declaring I Voted stuck on the back. When I first saw his phone, the randomness of it struck me as charming.

It still does.

Justin puts the car in gear, but before we start to move I grab his hand and offer an apologetic squeeze, although I don’t quite know what I’m apologizing for.

Annie wouldn’t like that either. If she were with us in the car, she’d side-eye me into oblivion. Maybe chuck her well-worn copy of The Awakening onto my lap from the back seat. I thought you might need some leisure reading for your trip, she’d deadpan, trying to make me laugh and cringe at the same time.

But, then again, she doesn’t know what I’ve done.

At least that’s something she and Justin have in common.

Justin and I stay like this for a few quiet breaths, hands entwined like the lovers that we are, until he edges my Chevy Corsica into the light traffic of Youngstown city proper. After trading in and out of a few highway exits we move off the interstate, and the scenery turns picturesque: red barns and white houses with laundry still hanging from the line despite the cold.

The sun is starting to set as we transition from farmland into forest, and cleared fields give way to foothills. The landscape becomes denser with trees, and the berm on the side of the road is littered with remnants of past snows. Looking out the window, I catch a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror. My brown hair is longer than it’s been in a while, and the tips poke out from underneath my knitted cap. I’ve always looked young for my age, and my students at the university often mistake me for a fellow undergraduate. I try out a smile for myself in the mirror, and in my reflection I look happy.

I turn from the window towards Justin, and the smile strips away from my face.

Something is wrong.

His hands grip so hard at the wheel that his knuckles are white and bloodless. My first assumption is that his anxiety about driving has been triggered by something—the enclosing woods, the hill we seem to be descending—and I reach out to touch him again, but as I do he jerks the wheel violently to the left and my hand glances his skin and instead lands firmly on the steering wheel.

I grab the soft leather and hold on, trying to calm the rising panic in my gut.

Why don’t you pull over? I can drive for a little while.

He ignores me and gives another jerk to the wheel, this time to the right. I lose my grip, my hand falling with a dull thud onto the side of my seat. I hear our tires gnashing into the debris on the side of the road.

Take a deep breath, I say, my voice calmer than I feel by a million times over. Because I’m certain now, watching Justin twist the wheel as he pushes on the accelerator, that this isn’t just a panic attack. This is something more. Something else.

The headlights of an oncoming car appear around a curve. In the dusk I can’t see the car fully, but something inside tells me that Justin is going to jerk the wheel towards this other car, and so I reach out to grab the steering wheel with both of my hands. My chest is held back by my seat belt, which seems to be so enamored with its job that it’s locked itself into a shorter length, and I can only get my hands around the right side of the wheel. Still, it’s enough to counter Justin’s swerve to the left that comes a second later, and I manage to shift our car back into our lane.

Sweat pricks at my temples and under my arms. My mind is full of the sound of crunching metal and the feel of shattered glass sprinkling my cheeks. Memories I haven’t retrieved for years. Memories I didn’t even know I had.

Déjà vu floods my senses, followed by the spiky thrusts of dread.

What are you doing? I ask Justin, desperation turning my voice into Valley Girl upspeak. Like I’m asking him why he came home with farm-raised beets instead of wild-caught. I’m still trying to free myself from the seat belt, which is clinging to my body and won’t release me, no matter how much I rail against it. I want to shift forward to look him in the eye, to have him look at my face and stop this, whatever it is he’s trying to do.

I love you, I want to say, but the words get swallowed by the thrashing of the wheels as they skid along the road.

And then his phone rings, and a name pops up on the screen.

"Mom" is calling, it says.

Justin and I look at the phone together in an odd duet. My mouth opens and closes, a bilge pump of fear. When he turns to me, our eyes lock, mine wild and erratic and his two steadfast pools of blue. I think I see something shift in his face, a flicker of a feeling I can’t identify. He looks back at the road, unbuckles his seat belt, and pushes his foot hard down on the accelerator. We are coming up to a hairpin turn, and the inertia of our bodies and the car encasing them wills us off the road, so I fling my hand out to the steering wheel one more time. Justin’s skin is hard as a stone. The pads of my fingers prickle.

I hear the squeal of tires, the crunch as we move from the road to the berm, and the sickening crack of the car’s front end making contact with the trunk of an ancient tree. Justin’s hand goes limp underneath mine.

There again is that familiar shower of shattering glass, followed by a cry of pain. The voice I hear could be Justin’s, or mine, or both of ours mixed together in a polyphony of terror.

Until the cry is replaced with another voice—her voice.

My mother’s.

Morgan. The sound of my name hums like a buzz saw. Morgan.

Her voice creeps out from behind lead-lined doors.

My mind is playing tricks on me. Again.

And just like all the other times, hearing her say my name is not a wish my mind is making.

It’s a nightmare.

2

BEFORE

The podiums at the front of classrooms are really all the same. By this point in the semester, just a few weeks away from final exams, they are chock-full of jettisoned belongings, left and never claimed by their owners. In my classroom there’s an earring with two musical notes dangling from the post, an umbrella, a pathogen-experience of a coffee cup with the remnants of coffee from several weeks ago, three Five Star notebooks, and a miscellaneous gathering of pens and pencils. I push all of this aside to make room for my lecture notes, my water bottle, and my phone.

After I set it on the faux-wood desk, I check my phone is on silent. Only a month or so in, Justin and I are already settling into familiar patterns. For instance, Justin likes to text me in the middle of the day. For no reason really, just to tell me he’s thinking about me, and as much as I find it kind of mid-century adorable, I also don’t need my students hearing those little pings and getting distracted. It’s hard enough keeping their attention without my social life on full display.

When I look up I notice a young woman sitting in the front row, smiling at me.

I don’t know her in particular—my classes are large and full of students in both my department and from other majors—and her nondescript features make her blend into other young women sitting beside her. All are pretty, brunette or blond with matching ponytails, wearing sweatshirts emblazoned with Youngstown State’s name and insignia.

I make eye contact until she looks away. Maybe it’s a display of dominance by me; maybe it’s just me seeking out some odd version of camaraderie because today’s topic always leaves me feeling like I have no skin by the end of it. Anticipating how I’m going to spend the next seventy-five minutes, that part of my brain—the part that I’ve sectioned off through sheer force of will, and with more than a little help from Dr. Koftura—buzzes inside my head. I’ve gotten used to it over the years, like the murmur of static playing at a low volume in the background of my life. Just sometimes—not too often—the volume gets turned up.

I check my phone to see if Justin got back to me. I called him on my way to class, but he is in a meeting with his advisor and can’t really talk.

Yes, we’re one of those couples that still talk to each other on the phone. Justin actually asked me out on a date in person, after sitting in on a lecture I gave about language development. And the other night I found a handwritten note waiting on my pillow when I woke up. Dare to dream, but I think I’ve found an old-school romantic.

Ever still, my blank home screen stares back at me, except for the clock on my phone as it ticks down to the deadline to begin the lecture. I look up at the girl who smiled at me before, but she’s now engrossed in her laptop screen.

I take a breath to focus, but as I’m exhaling, a green bubble pops up on my screen. My podium vibrates and my heart does a little involuntary flip, which makes me smile and cringe simultaneously.

I have a new text.

Are you okay?

I pause, caught off guard. It’s a weird thing to ask just because I called him to say hello.

Maybe those patterns aren’t as familiar as I thought.

I answer quickly, underneath the tray of my podium’s computer keyboard.

Yes. Just nervous about lecture today. Talk later. xoxo

I stick on my lapel mic, take a sip of water, and I’m on.

Good afternoon, class. Today we’re examining child abuse and neglect—otherwise known in the broader sense as child maltreatment. Now you know at this point in the semester, that I was raised in foster care, and we’ll be examining the foster care system as well, given that children subjected to abuse and neglect are typically placed within that system to ensure their safety.

I take a step away from the podium, and click to the next slide on the presentation.

At this point I offer my students a resigned and practiced smile. I know I’m making it look easy to talk about my past. Of course, safety is not always found in foster homes.

I move to another slide and my students see a flow chart of the child welfare system, which looks like a multi-headed hydra vomiting agencies, acronyms, and abbreviations.

By the end of today, I promise you’ll understand how children come to harm. I expect to see grimaces on a few faces, and I do. And I also promise. . .

My phone vibrates again on the podium, and for a moment it breaks my concentration. Several students in the front rows of the auditorium seem distracted by it as well.

I should have turned it off, not just set it to vibrate.

And I also promise that you will leave class today with the knowledge to prevent children from coming to harm.

I say this in a flourish to make up for my minor lapse. Students expect a certain level of theatrics to keep their attention. Sometimes I jump up and down and shake my hair side to side. Often I laugh at my own jokes when no one laughs with me—an occupational hazard. I’ll even imitate the coos and babbles of babies so that students can understand how language begins. But today I only offer a swish of my arm from fourth to third position in ballet—Patty and Dave signed me up for classes. They were an older couple who gave me a room all to myself and wanted to keep me, until they didn’t. Over the almost-year that I lived with them, Patty and Dave signed me up for whatever classes I showed interest in. Ballet and tap. Mandarin. Self-defense.

Sometimes those classes are useful in my life.

A few nights ago, while I cleared the table after dinner and Justin did the washing up—he’d made us spaghetti carbonara, my favorite—I caught him looking at me. He’d said that even when doing boring chores, like gathering up the dirty dishes, I carried myself like a dancer. It’s not the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me.

Except that it kind of was.

Today I’ll tell my students about Patty and Dave. And the other places I was sent to.

As I’m talking, I hear the door creak open at the back and, careful to not give away my line of sight, I glance up to see who’s arriving late to class, ready to tap at my watch and give them a well-practiced stink-eye. But it’s not one of my students. Instead, I see Justin’s dark shock of hair easing into the classroom, along with the rest of him. He’s wearing his long, navy-blue peacoat, cheeks bright pink from the cold, and eyes focused only on me.

In an instant the static shifts; her voice inside my head.

"Speak of the devil and he will appear."

It shocks me, and I drop the remote mouse I’ve been using to advance through the slides with my students. For the next several seconds, I stoop over and try to clasp the stupid device in my fist again, but my hands don’t seem to be working.

It’s one of the few things I can recall about my childhood: her voice, and what she used to tell me when I’d ask for her help, her love. For money to get milk at the R & S market on the corner, for a kiss at bedtime, for her to sign the form that would let me get free lunches at school. My memories of life before care lie in strange and disconnected pockets inside my brain. Compartmentalizing. I learned about the phenomenon in graduate school. Although Dr. Koftura calls it something different. And sometimes, and only with Annie, it’s my Hot Pocket memory. Better out than in, she’ll bellow between slurps of root beer or the chaw of a Snickers bar.

If you can’t make fun of brain damage with your best friend, then maybe you should rethink your life.

Dr. Koftura and I determined during one of our sessions that the scene that ran on repeat the longest was probably an amalgam of memories, stacked together and compressed like steel inside my head. In it, my mother calls out my name again and again, until I take the risk of going into her bedroom. She’s lying splayed out across the dull brown comforter, the shades drawn and the smell of liquor and other things sweating out through her skin. Her face is blurry except for her mouth, which I can see with perfect clarity in my mind as her upper lip curls in on itself and she says it, that phrase that so often greeted me: Speak of the devil. . . Later, hurtling around from home to home because I was a poor fit or unreliable or even dangerous—because attractive pre-teen girls always are to some degree—I became convinced that my mother knew something about me no one else would admit. Even now, with all I’ve accomplished, it’s hard to know if it’s true or not—whether my mother thought of me as the devil.

And honestly, it’d be easier for me if she did.

It takes every ounce of my self-control to bring my mind back to my lecture, my students, my classroom, but I do it. I finally grasp the cheap plastic mouse, stand up, and smooth down the front of my skirt. I do so because the alternative of letting my life descend into a chaos of bad memories isn’t an option. Not for me.

Because that would mean letting her win.

Justin stays at the top of the classroom, his back against the wall, while I handle the line of students waiting to talk to me after I dismiss class. He doesn’t walk down the aisle until the room is empty.

I must give him a look, because the first thing he says is, Is it okay that I came?

He’s worrying his hands by rubbing them together, a nervous habit I haven’t seen before. I hope I didn’t intrude, or make you feel. . . he pauses, apparently searching for the right word, and then rejects the sentence altogether. I hope I don’t seem like a stalker or anything.

He tries to laugh at his joke, and then gives up.

I work to rearrange my face, then give a little laugh back. I thought I’d recovered from earlier, but seeing Justin up close has me feeling upended. I give a silent fuck you to my mother for trying to ruin another good thing in my life, even though I haven’t seen her for almost twenty years.

I’m too slow to react, and Justin goes on, growing more uncomfortable by the second.

I’m just not doing well today, am I? he says, chin tilted down as he talks. His bangs fall over his right eye and he absentmindedly brushes them away.

It’s no big deal, I finally manage to say. I give him a smile and reach to take his hand, hoisting my bag over my shoulder.

I saw your text about your lecture today. I felt bad that I couldn’t talk when you needed me.

That catches my attention.

All auditory hallucinations aside, showing up at my class like I’m too fragile to handle my job isn’t the coolest thing he could have done. And that text earlier. . .

Really, I appreciate the gesture. I give his hand a squeeze. Next time, though. . . I begin, but students for the following class start to pour into the room, all of them managing to walk and stare at their phones at the same time.

What is it? His eyes meet mine, those blue eyes like two pools I could happily drown in. He looks so earnest, like he’d do anything to make me happy—all I have to do is ask.

I decide to let it drop. I’m in no shape to pick a fight, anyway.

It’s nothing, I say, and we walk up the carpeted aisle, through the door, and out into the biting cold of December. Snowflakes are falling, and he offers to walk down to the student center and buy a hot chocolate for me at Starbucks. It’s a little ritual of mine after rough lecture days. A warm sweet drink after the bitter lecture topic for today is exactly what I want.

When I’m back at my office, hot chocolate in hand, and Justin headed across campus to his office, I check my phone to see the text Justin sent earlier that day during my lecture.

I’m coming, he’d written.

After the police have confiscated my phone, I’ll go back to the messages between Justin and me, replaying them over and over in my mind, and realize how they might read as something other than love.

3

Justin lives in an apartment on the second floor of an old Victorian building, just a few blocks away from campus. I live within walking distance of the campus, too, but in the opposite direction in a young professional complex, housing other junior faculty at the university. My building looks like an IKEA catalogue manifesting itself in rust-belt Ohio—all straight lines and white edges—but Justin’s apartment is different. It has, for lack of a better word, balls. There are spires and turrets, and one of the apartments on the first floor actually has a stained glass window. There are bats, literally, in the belfry. Well, technically it’s an attic, but still.

Justin showed them to me one night as they headed out for dinner from under the eaves of the roof. You can tell they’re bats, and not birds, he’d said, because they look like chaos in the sky.

The neighborhoods around Youngstown State’s buildings were once all derelict and vacant, with pigweed and thistle growing taller than me, and walking to Justin’s apartment I look for the winter carcasses of gargantuan rogue plants growing out of cracks in sidewalks and the broken asphalt of abandoned driveways. When I would run by them on the five-mile loop I followed religiously as an undergraduate at YSU, I’d have to dodge the swarms of bees that gathered around the weeds on warm days. Now, in the years since I’d left for grad school and had returned to teach here, most of the surrounding blocks have been razed and rebuilt with luxury student housing, new or renovated parks,

Reviews for It Was Always You

[Callen Gerrits · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

A plodding, unlikely plot and flat characters that were difficult to feel anything for. A disappointing read.